The Part about Anthony's Dog

Anthony's apparently been surreptitiously supporting the Union of Concerned Scientists by pretending he's a dog (if I've got that right). Anyway, he used his dog's name to subscribe, maybe thinking he needed to hide his true identity in case UCS didn't accept fake skeptics as members.

That's right, Anthony pretended to be his dog! He thinks it's hilarious that UCS accepted his subscription in his dog's name (Kenji). Others will no doubt be bemused by the lengths to which he felt he had to go in order to 'spy' on the highly secretive (not!) UCS.

(Some of you may even call to mind Anthony's ongoing outrage at Dr Gleick pretending to be a human being with Heartland Institute. Dog impersonations are okay but human impersonations are not. The other difference being that the UCS is completely open, while the Heartland Institute is a very secretive organisation.)

And Now the Curious Tale

Anthony claims something the UCS wrote isn't true, while in the same article posting more than ample evidence showing that what the UCS wrote was spot on. (Yes, if you thought Anthony was a bit odd for pretending to be his dog, what follows is even more odd.)

Enter The Union of Concerned Scientists

Watts claims this statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists is 'completely false'. He underlined said statement in red so his readers would understand to what he is referring:

So, let's see. Did Fox News lead in with the headline: "New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming" or not?

Enter Fox Nation

We don't have to go to Fox News to find out, but you can if you like by clicking here. Anthony kindly posts a screenshot of their article:

Let's examine these two statements more closely. Maybe Watts found a letter changed somewhere:

UCS accurately quoted the ridiculous headline from Fox. Reuters had a completely different headline.

Just in case you are wondering if Reuters changed their headline at some stage, here is a link to their article using Wayback Machine. (Watts also provides the headline from The Telegraph, which was equally misleading but different from that of Fox: "Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study".)

What did Watts not Spot?

For starters, Anthony did not point out that Fox made up their own headline. But as you'll have figured out already, Watts missed a much more fundamental point.

Why is the Union of Concerned Scientists amazed, amused and appalled?

Well, the research did NOT find that wind farms 'cause global warming'. The research found that wind farms have a local warming effect.

Anthony even posts the abstract of the research paper in question, but still hasn't twigged why the Union of Concerned Scientists scoffed at the Fox News headline.

Here is the relevant part of the abstract as shown on WUWT. Anthony even bolded the sentence about local (not global) warming "over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions":

The World's Most Visited Anti-Science Website and Winner of the Bloggies Lifetime Achievement Award

And @bloggies wonders why science blogs have no interest in sharing a platform with their 'lifetime achievement winner' WUWT?

Summarising for people who are unfamiliar with the context, what this example illustrates quite neatly is:

1) Double standards

In Watts world, he can fake his own identity (posing as a dog!), but if someone else does so much as use an on-line identity (eg Sou), Watts calls them "anonymous cowards" at best or effectively calls for them to be flogged drawn and quartered.

What is even more ridiculous is that Watts felt he needed to fake his identity at all - as if he thinks there is a 4,000 strong inner UCS sanctum that operates in secrecy. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn't set criteria for membership AFAIK. Anyone can join, even a someone posing as a dog! I don't know if they boot people out for any reason. Most organisations have some base criteria.)

Makes you wonder what sort of circles Watts usually inhabits? (Such weird thinking is consistent with the notion that almost ALL the scientists, journalists, politicians and the majority of the general public are part of a decades long conspiracy to deceive the few remaining science deniers, and that climate science is a 'hoax'.)

Watts didn't pick up on 'global' vs 'local'. Watts may not even know that there is a difference between a local effect and a global effect. That would go some way to explaining his ongoing obsession with individual surface stations long after it's been proven time and time again that individual stations being out balances out once they are aggregated. (This includes a paper that listed Watts himself as one of the authors. Seems that comprehending the findings of a paper is not a pre-requisite for being listed as an author.)

What Watts is trying to do is 'pass off' as 'completely false' something that he himself has proven to be true - in the very same article. So far neither he nor anyone commenting over there has appeared to understand what the UCS was referring to.

Good work. It's not hard to catch out the deceipt and lies these people like Watts peddle. And even when exposed it's the lack of integrity of those that continue to support and promote them that erodes your faith in human nature.

"Such weird thinking is consistent with the notion that almost ALL the scientists, journalists, politicians and the majority of the general public are part of a decades long conspiracy to deceive the few remaining science deniers, and that climate science is a 'hoax'."

Hilariously, five pages of google hits for the claim "climate science is a hoax" lead back to a single originator: Stephan Lewandowsky.

We "deniers" don't say that. We "deniers" don't believe that.

Then again, the good professor considers engaging with us—the main subjects of his research—to be "an enormous waste of time"!

Then again, the good professor considers engaging with us—the main subjects of his research—to be "an enormous waste of time"!

Yes, many psychological studies have shown that to be true. Hard core deniers are driven by forces other than reason. This is from the recent Lewandowsky study, Recursive Fury:

First, much of science denial takes place in an epistemically closed system that is immune to falsifying evidence and counterarguments (Boudry & Braeckman, 2012; Kalichman, 2009). We therefore consider it highly unlikely that outreach e fforts to those groups could be met with success......This con finement of recursive hypotheses to a small "echo chamber" reflects the wider phenomenon of radical climate denial, whose ability to generate the appearance of a widely held opinion on the internet is disproportionate to the smaller number of people who actually hold those views (e.g., Leviston, Walker, & Morwinski, 2012). This discrepancy is greatest for the small group of people who deny that the climate is changing (around 6% of respondents; Leviston et al., 2012). Members of this small group believe that their denial is shared by roughly half the population. Thus, although an understanding of science denial is essential given the importance of climate change and the demonstrable role of the blogosphere in delaying mitigative action, it is arguably best met by underscoring the breadth of consensus among scientists (Ding, Maibach, Zhao, Roser-Renouf, & Leiserowitz, 2011; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Vaughan, 2012) rather than by direct engagement.

Really? You mean if a link to your own page on which you quote someone NOT saying the words in dispute isn't enough, then you're generously offering me a google search for another, equally-irrelevant phrase?

What have I done to deserve such generosity, Sou?

LOL ....

Now, just to clear up whether we're dealing with an ethical or a lexical defect on your part, please answer as honestly as you can manage, Sou:

Do you, or do you not, notice the gaping difference between someone arguing that climate science is a hoax, and someone arguing that CAGW is a hoax?

from time to time people tell me (generally in the middle of losing an argument with me) that I'm too fond of playing "semantics", "word games", etc.

Maybe they're right.

My favourite is a little game called "Let's Use The Right Words."

CAGW is not synonymous with climate science, nor would the fraudulence of the former imply the fraudulence of the latter. Not even close. Deny the difference all you like—it won't go away.

CAGW, AGW, GW, MMGW, APGW, etc. are hypotheses in climate science. Whether they're realities or misconceptions, whether you prefer to call them opinions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories or laws, it doesn't particularly matter for the present purpose—they're not interchangeable with climate science and they never will be.

To conflate or mistake a field of science for a theory within that field, whether tactically or through genuine ignorance, leads you to the absurd pass of having to say that anyone challenging any theory is denying science. (Actually you may possibly be quite comfortable saying things like that, but trust me—when normal people hear it, it sounds insane.) You'd have to say, for example, that the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dan Schectman was denying chemistry when he challenged the existing chemistry wisdom on semi-periodicity in crystals. You'd have to say that Warren and Marshall were denying medicine when they argued that the standard medical treatment for peptic ulcers was flawed.

PS:

In rē CAGW, you may think my "side" invented the "acronym," but the fact that you can't even define it correctly doesn't bode well for your ability to argue meaningfully on this. It doesn't "refer to" what you say it "refers to." Please try again, Sou. This is a useful mental exercise, if nothing else.

Brad, you wore out that argument long ago. You can't go around making up stuff, re-defining words and denying a body of knowledge exists and expect people to agree with you. If you want that, go to WUWT or Jo Nova or HotCopper. (I expect you got those fanciful ideas from some denier site - you think there's some other mysterious body of knowledge around that conflicts with all the known knowledge of the past 200 years - even though no-one has published it yet and no-one else has ever heard of it and it presumably re-writes all the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.) A classic case of 'climate science is a hoax'.

Climate science is a body of knowledge about the climate, which includes the fact that humans are heating the earth. Trying to demote facts to 'hypothesis' doesn't change the facts, it just makes you look like a denier.

I don't know what you 'believe' about climate science, nor care. Maybe you can take your pick from rationalwiki (link in the top RH corner):

In scientific denialism, the denialist can deny a cause (carbon dioxide does not cause global warming), an effect (global warming does not occur), the association between the two (the earth is warming, but not because of carbon dioxide), the direction of the cause-and-effect relationship (carbon dioxide concentrations are increased because the earth is warming) or the identification of the cause-and-effect relationship (other factors than greenhouse gases cause the earth to warm). Often denialists will practice minimization (the earth is warming, but it's not harmful) and will use misplaced skepticism in the veneer of being a scientist when it is unwarranted.

Great post! From memory this isn't the first time he's pulled this dog trick, and it backfired then too. Perhaps someone should browse the name of the IPCC reviewers for the name "Kenji" before we get the inevitable "ha ha my dog is in the AR5" blog post.

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All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
‘a climate change denier’

Alternative definition: A former French coin, equal to one twelfth of a Sou, which was withdrawn in the 19th century. Oxford. (The denier has since resurfaced with reduced value.)